Category: Translator: Regina Anavy

These days I have wandered with my lawyer through the “legal systems” of Cuba. The Castro brothers, who own the Birán estate that was previously their father’s, later extended the fence to the limit of the jurisdictional waters and converted the estate into Birania. They seized the rest of the nation and have “governed” it as if it were their personal fiefdom, by pure caprice and personal interest.

Back in 1994, they captured me for accompanying my sister to the coast to say goodbye to  her. After 14 months in La Cabaña prison (hell). I was acquitted and they withdrew the charge of “concealment” because I heard at trial that among siblings and parents this offense does not apply. The fact is that I suffered for that year and two months, with its days, hours, minutes and seconds. I should thank them for making me do time, because I matured earlier than I would have by my nature, education and environment. I always say that if God exists he sent me there because thanks to him I was able to prove myself through poverty, the suffering of Cuban youth, and the many tears that I saw fall in those cell blocks. I discovered that my vocation was to be a writer.

I devoted myself to writing in body and soul, and with a literature that highlights the plight of Cubans through the manipulated image that the “revolution” has made us suffer. My characters appeared, shaped into stories and books. These volumes were awarded the most coveted prizes, in spite of officials who tried to see a way of containing my ascent as a writer. Of course I suffered in 1992, when they took away from me the Casa de las Americas prize, according to the testimony of the jurors themselves. In 1994 something similar happened, and finally to run no risk, they decided to remove my work from any contests where there were awards. They also removed my work from portfolios, anthologies and literary events. That was my punishment, the price I paid for writing a critical story that was aggressive according to the dogma of the dictatorship. Honestly I never cared, I was aware it was my duty, and it’s impossible to resist your own nature.

I was visited by several intellectuals who told me to stop.

I don’t hide that I always had the need to write my opinion, my point of view, on the environment, on people I knew, their frustrations, desires, dilemmas, fears, horizons and all that could happen to human beings. I dreamed of writing in a newspaper, on a corner of the last page, but I also knew that was impossible, that with the Cuban system I never could, since all the newspapers are administered by the government, and any attempt to create an independent one is punished with the toughest laws.

On a visit to the Book Fair in the Dominican Republic, I learned there was something called a blog, and it was the closest thing to that little corner of a newspaper, however unimportant it was. I dreamed about posting. On returning I opened my blog. Immediately I was visited by several intellectuals who told me to desist; that was my first warning. I persisted. So I was removed from the Cubarte email, which was paid monthly, to prevent my connection with the rest of the world. I resisted.

After two months I was assaulted by members of State Security, who broke my arm. They thought that this reprisal would be sufficient. They never were more wrong, because by then, with the cast on my arm, I needed to double my effort to write more on the blog and to go meet other Cuban bloggers who offered me support. They staged several repudiation rallies at my front door. Sometimes I went by and greeted them, thinking they were CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution) meetings. Then I found out they were against me, and my neighbors found a way, without being seen, to tell me they were there but had nothing against me and supported me, and they always justified themselves by talking about family, retaliation, etc.

The Prosecutor asked for the laughable sentence of 54 years in prison.

When they realized that blows would not be the way to make me give up, they brought accusations. The first was when I started the paperwork to go to the Word Festival in Puerto Rico. They had to avoid my attending at all costs, and the only way to do this was to bring a civil lawsuit to hide that I was being punished for my point of view.

They began with detaining me, saying I had knocked down a child with my car and I would abscond. The child, as I have said several times, luckily never appeared, nor did the charges. But the time of arrest was on the record.

Finally they manipulated my ex, from whom I had been separated for over two years. They accused me, without any evidence or witnesses, of so many things as if they had happened that perhaps they thought at some point of torment I might ask for mercy and promise to surrender.

The truth is that adding up all those years in prison, according to the prosecutor’s request, amounted to the laughable sum of 54 years (without including the other charges that they brought and then dismissed).

The prosecutor, anticipating how ludicrous that would look to international opinion, decided to “combine” the charges and requested 15 years in prison. For this they invented a “witness” (with acute neurological problems, who was a career criminal with more than 30 convictions, including theft, fraud, harassment of foreigners, etc..), and thanks to a hidden camera the truth came out and he showed the clothing they gave him and other gifts he had been promised, and invitations to dinners and swimming pools, all in exchange for a declaration against me.

When they learned about the video, because I gave it to the prosecutor, they accused me of “attack” because they made him declare that he had been threatened into making the video. Finally an expert showed that the man in the video was telling the truth. I suppose the complaint was not eradicated since I was never summoned to make a statement.

They worked in a feverish manner to make me submit.

Since then I’ve been waiting for the trial. After three years of being summoned to the Picota station at 100 and Aldabó, I can understand they are tired, bored with waiting for my submission, my incorporation into the fold. There is no shortage of advice; I always warned them that it wouldn’t happen, but they have so little capacity to understand that they worked feverishly to make me submit. Finally, from my first statements to what they are today, there are differences, they changed them, but what they didn’t imagine is that the first time they delivered the file I photographed every page, and you can see the rough work of falsification they did to incriminate me. Now they settle for keeping me waiting. My case is in legal limbo.

When I turned up with my lawyer at the Provincial Prosecutor’s, which is in charge of bringing my case, they informed us that my file was sent to the General Prosecutor of the Republic. We went to this office, which is located in Miramar. We were told it was sent back to the Provincial Prosecutor. We left the building and to avoid the trip, as we suspected the answer, we telephoned and were assured that the file had not been returned. Fifteen minutes after my attorney returned to the same office requesting that they get their story straight,  there was no choice but to inform him that my file had been delivered to Officer Ribeiro, at the Villa Marista (the seat of Cuban State Security).

Visit to Villa Marista.

After the information we headed towards Vibora. We stayed for two hours in the waiting room. They told us that the file couldn’t be found. And we had no choice but to return and continue to wait. In fact the “judicial laws” require that notice of any movement of the case file has to be given to the defense counsel. This step was never fulfilled.

In these three years I had to turn down 27 invitations from universities, festivals, book presentations and book fairs. Right now five of my books are being published in different countries. I think that’s the real punishment.

Anyway, I always say, we are the generation of children that nobody wanted, and if they gave me the opportunity to return to the time I opened the blog and caused myself so much trouble, without even thinking about it I would do it again, only with more emphasis.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Translated by Regina Anavy

April 29 2012

“A Miami-based Cuban journalist” is the same one who, a while ago, was complaining, as usual, because in Miami they permitted for only 24 hours a billboardshowing the five spies sentenced by the United States. We should thank him in some way for teaching us that there, in “enemy” territory, at least they can engage in political criticism and disagree with the government. By contrast, in Cuba you can’t even think differently. And I congratulated him for having fled with his family to a land, if not of absolute freedom, at least of limited freedom, as he wanted to explain in his column.

And now this man once again has the nerve to say in a Cuban newspaper, “Cuba is making progress, despite the doomsayers” (29-11-2011), without specifying which way is forward, it may be the abyss, and he states that “I had a friend in Miami who was a radio commentator; heconducted interviews and made comments on that city. He defended Cuba (meaning the dictatorship) to the hilt and attacked the extreme right-wing Cuban Americans with a sarcasm and intellectual ability that few can imagine.”

I wonder if the author hadone lobe of his brainremovedso that he doesn’t mindlooking ridiculous, clumsily trying to manipulate the Cuban opinion. Or ishe just another propagandist, supposedly a journalist, since the paper supports everything they put in it. In short, he is complying with the regime and continuing to receive benefits that are granted in return for the services he provides.

Howcan this guy play with the intelligence of Cubans in such aclumsy and inconsistent way? Or is he laughing cynically about the people of Cuba? I’ll never understandhow someone who left the countryto improvehis professional and private life now defends the cause that made him flee. Because it’s impossible to be an envoy of Castro in Miami, a member of another “Wasp Network” that operates without prejudice in the media there, and thatsurvives olympically under the noses of its enemies.

The fact that someone in Miami had a radio program where he judged, criticized and ridiculed the samepeople who aresuffering deeply fromthedistance from their land, without anyone shutting downhis program, or taking revengewith their own hands, seems to me an act of stoicism on the part of those who had to endure it.

I refuse to believe that Mr. Lazarus Fariña has forgotten the fierce repression and censorship that exists in Cuba,now for over50 years, where we never were permitted to havea personal, private and independent media that would provide free speech. Not even the ability to print something, nor the right to write reviews, newspaper articles, radio spots, not to mention accessing the Internet. How canhe defend a process that punishes, with years in prison, those who voice a thought critical of Fidel Castro?

Characters like Lazarus Fariñas are thosewe sadly see in a future democratic Cuba, also defending the politicians in power.

Later he continueshis contradictory writing, wanting to protect whathe criticizes. Since criticizing censorship in order to defend the Cuban government has put him in a bind. Mr. Fariña talks nonsense by saying that this radio commentator, now deceased, named Álvaro Sánchez Cifuentes, “belonged to the revolutionary militias at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion.” However, clearly his destiny became twisted, and he ended up living in Miami, with thosehe fought in order to avoid being forced to emigrate years later. And he survived in the city where his enemies live, thosehe provoked tirelessly, according to reports, when he asserts that”I let myself go,gave them nicknames and laughed at the stupidity of thesetragicomic characters of thelocal theater that make up the so-called Cuban exile community of Miami.”

Where Fariñas reaches new levels of cynicism is when he says “I’ve never liked participating in programs run by people who hold my own opinion. I prefer debate and discussion.” I infer that the place referred to is Cubadebate, the space of least possibility of discerningthat exists and in which the official, registered “journalists” publish, like Fariñahimself. Even more contradictory is the fact that his article is published in a country where not even a remote chance exists of challenging an official opinion, and in a newspaper where all opinions go in one direction.

Mr. Fariñas enjoys the benefits of being on both sides. He lives his “fierce” capitalism, which he doesn’t abandon, and he defends the system that doesn’t accompany it. From a short distance the story is different, and he knows it better than anyone. He survives in Miami andtakes his vacationsin Cuba. These peoplewho don’t knowthe meaning of the word”dignity” are the allies that the Cuban government deserves.

WhatI most wish for Mr. Fariñas is that his U.S. citizenship berevoked and he is returned to his Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, that they make him President of his block, and that he experience the stark reality of the Cuban people.

Then we’ll see what he says.

Translated by Regina Anavy

February 17 2012

I’ll never forget when the news came from Radio Marti that we Cubans had a Cardinal. My mother, excited, let me know, and from her tearful eyes came her illusions about the Catholic Church, that had just added to its conclave a high church official. From her hopeless simplicity, my mother intended to convey to me that, hierarchically speaking, “a cardinal is more than Fidel,” as she decreed. I remember that I shook my head yes; I didn’t want to spoil her illusions.

Of course we know what a cardinal means, but those who should have believed it didn’t. ”President” Fidel Castro and his supporters ultimately never finished the work of mowing down the church of the Cuban people. That unfinished task has always been his frustration.

In my humble person Pope John Paul II had one of the faithful who most admired him. My love for him became worship. In addition to being the Holy Father, he was a born political leader. And I will always keep the thrill I felt when he greeted me, an unimportant bystander, when he expressed love from his motorcade.

I will always remember his visit with gratitude. But if I had been his advisor, I would have suggested that he not turn up in a Cuba without freedom, without progress and without the most basic respect for human rights: Freedom of Expression. Many Cubans placed their hopes in his visit, thinking they would gain significant social achievements, political freedoms, and even that it augured multiparty elections.

It’s healthy to remember the years of “politicking” that keep the Castro brothers in power, and needless to say, they wouldn’t accept any visit, not even of Jesus Christ in person, if it jeopardized their power. I always knew that with objective clarity.

After the Pope left, we still have hope, even if we have empty hands, because after all we keep them in our pockets, there’s no point in showing how empty they are.

What we Cubans have to achieve won’t come from anyone’s visit, nor from the “peace concert”, although it had good intentions, nor from the “U.S. blockade.” It will come the day we demand what belongs to us by our own right. Then, after participatory democracy wins and Cubans have the right to choose freely and consistently what they want for themselves, we will welcome the current Pope, and also, spiritually, we will receive the Vicar of God, now in heaven, Father John Paul II, the simple man and scholar who was Wojtyla.

But we know that the road to paradise is paved with good intentions, and so is the one that leads to freedom on the island of Cuba.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Translated by Regina Anavy

January 26 2012

These days the Cuban nation should be crying and writhing in its own betrayal. It gives the sensation of a country winding down, that sells quickly, like someone trying to extract every possible benefit before leaving.

For years it has been auctioning off its cultural heritage on the Internet. Works by leading artists who are not even alive to replace them. Creations that would be difficult to return to our country. This year important works by Servando Cabrera Moreno have been auctioned off for more than 600,000 dollars: A 1957 painting, “Figure with Bird,” “Cocoon” (1945), “Emilio’s Daughter” (1974), and “Kisses” (1966). Also “Last Journey” (1979) by Wilfredo Lam. Among the 44 artists were Tomás Sánchez, Mario Carreño, René Portocarrero, Amelia Peláez and Raúl Martínez. In recent years we have lost an important part of the pictorial wealth of the nation.

In other countries, when private collectors decide to sell, government regulations to preserve the cultural heritage, which is untouchable, establish that the State has priority over cases of interest. Owners have to accept three propositions. They can keep the work but not sell it. They do not have the right to take it out of the country. Also, if they keep a work considered to be part of the nation’s heritage in their house, an annual tax must be paid to the State. This seems a laudable idea to me. I believe that the place for the best paintings of every nation is in its museums, so that they can be admired by both nationals and visiting foreigners.

Theft and demagoguery

Yet lately we hear denunciations from Cuban government spokespeople lamenting the “thefts in the museums by the Allied troops when they entered Iraq.” Also, the world still mourns for the cultural works destroyed and sacked by the Nazi hordes in the invaded countries, a great part of which remain hidden.

But in Cuba it’s like we don’t have the ability to look at ourselves. Education was required for the sake of protecting the supposed Revolution of 1959, and that was no more than a way of allowing Fidel Castro to commit his outrages without being criticized. I realize that to try to do so would have been a grievous mistake. Confronting him would have immediately led to a fierce punishment. Trying to criticize, even constructively and for “revolutionary” honesty, is seen as suicide.

Few of that generation, none of those who today live in the country and participate in the official social life, confronted the designs of Tsar Fidel Castro, and in cowardice they remained silent so they would not be considered eligible for punishment. They preferred to be slaves, silent accomplices, incapable of dissent. They considered this appropriate for survival, and they forgot their place before their own consciences and before history, which will remember them as they were and still are today.

And they tried to transmit that education to the three generations that followed them. And because we don’t accept it they brand us as traitors, saying that we are complicit with an enemy we don’t even know, one that hasn’t tried to “buy us,” “capture us,” or whatever other accusations the spokespeople make on that insufferable Round Table TV show. They don’t still believe in the consciousness of Marti. Later, in personal conversations, they acknowledge that there are problems with the system, and on occasion they even discover a certain admiration for the opposing positions that their fears, in moments of rebellion, don’t let them develop.

Beneficial Intellectuals

So what can remain of a cultural milieu whose Cuban Book Institute sent a group of intellectuals to a Book Fair in Mexico without guaranteeing them economic support? Especially since they were sent to represent Cuba, to obey the orders of the officials who sent them,   and to attack whomever opposed the State. They looked like a “delegation of famine,” and as official writers they were willing to wave the little flags so they could continue being considered “trustworthy” by the regime and keep receiving handouts as mercenaries.

Outside Cuba I have attended the National Literature Awards, to beg from the organizers of international events, with the excuse that “Cuba is poor,” so they will assume that its people are as well, and they bury their pride and decorum. The “Revolution” asked so many to sacrifice; there were times when it made them grovel to ask for pardon for words or actions committed, and the politicians were not grateful and made them lose their shame. I would have to quote the Indian Hatuey, “If that is the revolution, then I’d rather not be a revolutionary.”

Intellectuals, despite not sharing political views, are immeasurably respected for their creative and spiritual work and, in many cases, for their social mission. But they assume an attitude of silence, despite having their souls wounded by seeing how the cultural riches of a nation are lost. The Historian of Old Havana himself, Eusebio Leal, who has returned to the historic center the pride and respect it deserves, is silent before the government’s robbery. The great poet, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Director of the House of the Americas, also remains silent before the depredation, and will leave this life with the blood on his soul of the young men shot for trying to escape in a boat. The President of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), the ethnologist and writer Miguel Barnet, also is silent, as he has always known how to be. They, among many who are respectable voices, should join together to defend the cultural treasures of the nation.

What shall we do with the yacht Granma? Sink it into the sea?

Why doesn’t the Government of Cuba sell the yacht Granma? I know some who would buy it, to destroy it or worship it – the fate of that barge would be their choice. Why not sell all the possessions of the Argentine Ché Guevara? He has many fans in the world who would buy his weapons and uniforms with economic generosity. Let them strip those heroic museums throughout the island, filled with their materials of war. They could be auctioned off! But the egoism of the regime and their lack of respect for the culture has been constant. They get rid of art because they underestimate it. It bothers them because it doesn’t reflect their epic or because its authors are homosexual. They see it only as a source of wealth, and before the economic crisis they prefer to lose the nation’s heritage rather than the symbols that support their ideology, its great farce and fraud. And all this happens before the cowardly silence of the voices called to guard this heritage.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats.

Translated by Anonymous and Regina Anavy

December 22 2011

The last thing able to survive from our Cuban heritage is housing, owing to the totalitarian will of Fidel Castro, who dictated for more than 50 years that everything was his property and only he would decide what was whose and when it stopped being so. Fortunately or unfortunately, the family home was the only thing that couldn’t be sacrificed to survive the debacle that has lasted over 50 years. Soon that ban on the sale of real estate will be a memory.

In the 1980s, the Cuban people were robbed of jewelry inherited from their ancestors; the elderly, to satisfy their children and grandchildren and alleviate their extreme poverty, handed over their goods in exchange for a few “chavitos” [Cuban convertible pesos], which had value only in hard-currency stores, where the prices of the items were laughable. And everything worked like a robbery because there were no other stores where they could get these products, which were nothing special, other than the opportunity to acquire them.

Having dollars in those days could send you to prison for many years. People were confronted with the perfected gears of a governmental blackmail, which left some in bad shape, those who refused to sacrifice the memory of their ancestors for their family. In the end, the old women who gave up their engagement rings, relics that they exhibited on their hands as a window into profound feelings, did it with a mixture of pain and satisfaction, to please their families. They were left with the perception that they were duped like the Indians at the arrival of the Spanish, when they traded gold nuggets for stained glass.

The State also bought their porcelain vases, silver and gold, paintings that their ancestors hung on the walls to admire, design furniture, wealth that went into the coffers of politicians or their families and that now rest in safe deposit boxes in foreign banks. If I may say, it reminds me of the Jewish Holocaust, where they even removed gold teeth by force.

Our people are like the sugar cane: squeezed.

Cuban society has been sacked spiritually and materially, like the cane, which is repeatedly passed through the mill, where it loses consistency, becoming bagasse and powder. What’s painful is that everything happens in total silence, under the auspices and complicity of Cuban officials and intellectuals, who don’t comment because of the fear that always accompanies them in their artistic souls. They remained silent before the grand theft that exchanged jewelry for bread. For once they didn’t fulfill the role, so vaunted, that makes intellectuals the voice of society, its defender, its living memory. Instead, they preferred to turn their backs on the people, and history will recognize this in its righteous assessment.

But circumstances have changed so much for the ruling elite, that it has no choice but to revise its extreme methods and wave the flag, always for the sake of its benefit, ignoring the repeated and lengthy speeches that claimed that “private property will never return to Cuba.” Have you ever wondered how much pain it must cause Fidel Castro to see how the whole house of cards he forced us to visualize is crumbling? He wanted us to believe it as if it were true and palpable. What must be happening and what plans do they have for beginning to return some small freedoms that they took away before and that makes them feel they are losing their valued power? Surely it’s the same feeling of helplessness  the masters felt when they were forced to free their slaves. For let’s not deceive ourselves, no measure of this Government will ever improve things for the people, not even to restore the freedoms and rights that correspond to being human.

The right to be born….in the wrong place?

Now the government has approved the sale of houses, something that had already been announced. But it’s also been more than a year, as “by chance” they began in Cuba, after 50 years of stagnation, to update the property registrations. Everything has been done with the utmost urgency. It has been a so-called mandate for the state enterprises, with the inescapable management of citizens for any procedure involving their homes. In each municipality offices were opened to enter into the books the names of the current owners, with extreme urgency and pressure. They know that time is running out. The locals have handed over premises for these offices, given training courses, printed flyers that have been corrected, and delivered computers, files and office supplies. Visits by the Provincial Director of Justice and political officials are constant. They also are pressured with other requests. They have to answer for how much the total climbs when they get an entry on the books. The first person who began this task, as part of his duties as Prime Minister (Mayor of Havana), Juan Contino Aslan (may his small power rest in peace), was dismissed and now is on the “pajama plan,” (like his predecessors and political mentors, who allotted houses to their mistresses).

The Government of Cuba never makes a move that will not bring it compensation. But in this case, all the trappings lead us to the true intent, which is to take back the properties belonging to the old owners, who have left the country or died in Cuba.

The goal is to erase the past. When the State gets in its possession all the old properties, it will make them disappear and, with the registration, only the updated properties will remain. No property owner whose property was “nationalized” beginning in 1959, nor their heirs, will be able to reclaim something that doesn’t exist and that they can’t prove officially.

Perhaps some have conveyed their properties from exile, but they were the minority. And you might think it’s a commendable gesture of the Castros to assure Cubans that they will not be thrown into the street when the inevitable political change appears, but that would be naive. The real reason is that the power elite is trying to hide the family estates that were seized or inventoried after the departure of their original owners. Inside the great mountain of paper that contains the entries, the personal properties will be lost. By the way, this will reassure the generals and acolytes that they will not lose the confiscated property given to them when they came to power.

The country is bleeding 

The Cubans, in this carnival of small, unknown freedoms, in their desperation to change their reality, in the desire to fulfill some dreams, especially that of emigrating, now can sell their homes. Those who wish to stay on the island immediately think about how that money will solve all their pressing needs: eating, dressing and sleeping without the torture of not knowing what you will eat the next day. The government is already warning that it is “not responsible for the bad decisions of owners who spend the money and end up in homes in poor condition that may fall down, or for those who are wandering around without a roof over their heads.”

Once again, we wonder what function this supposed revolution had, which presumably was made to guarantee people a secure life with equal rights. What do we gain from suffering a dictatorship for more than 50 years, if at the end we find ourselves selling the only things we posses, the only things we could keep? And what’s worse, it’s a “socialist” state that has nothing to do with its people, who were its only standard and justification in this long march of agony.

 The Comandante’s bag

As a child, we thought the “coconut” would come for us, for our body; it would come to take us away for not eating all our sweet potatoes, or for not going to bed on time. After growing up we knew that the man with the bag, the bogeyman, had passed through our lives, and he took in his bundle more than wealth and family belongings. He took the lives and dreams of my grandparents, parents, siblings, friends, those relatives who still grasp me with their nails and their teeth so they won’t be snatched, and already he controls my children and now, if we permit him, our grandchildren.

The Cuban State, for more than half a century, has held up the monster of “capitalism,” which it constantly criticized, to children who were frightened that the “coconut” would come, and by studying so thoroughly the original, it now has become the reflection and has converted itself into the image of “the bogeyman who is coming to take us away,” in order to frighten us with capitalism as communist propaganda.

We Cubans have been scammed. The socialist State is slowly giving way to ideas with which they can perpetuate the dictatorship, a frank regression to capitalism. With the difference that now it will be more vulnerable, because there is no knowledge of either family or social infrastructure, which is necessary to meet and sustain a dignified life.

The big difference is in who wins at the considerable sacrifice of millions of Cubans in this more than half a century. The Castro family lives in luxurious mansions They own several cars and yachts. They travel constantly and have prosperous businesses, fortunes and properties in other countries. They definitely enjoy an income that allows them to live like millionaires.

The beginning of the 21st century has begun to be their end. They sense that they are running out of time. The only thing I don’t know is how and what they will develop for the family to maintain its status and wealth, and to ensure, of course, that it will not be returned later to the Cuban people.

While they prolong the strategies for usurious benefits for the Castro family, the Cuban peoples’ dreams of freedom and a prosperous economy are put off and continue being deferred.

Ángel Santiesteban Prats

Translated by Regina Anavy

November 16 2011

 

Two political leaders have died only a few hours apart. But aside from the timing, they were also incompatible in their ways of seeing life, acting and delivering for their people. One represented Justice on earth and the other personified evil. The first, Václav Havel, was a born fighter, an intellectual and politician by nature, one of those who did not wait for more suffering to oppose one of the most ferocious dictatorships of mankind. For this he was persecuted, humiliated, put into prison and tortured. At the end he died from the after-effects caused by his daring to face a dictatorship that suffocated its people. But at least his people knew how to reward him, and today they mourn him, because he gave them the gift of a free and prosperous country. He was President for the time he needed; he served his term and then watched as his country took off and developed.

The other death, of the dictator Kim Jong Il, we can’t call “human loss,” because for that we would have to have feelings that justify that category. He was no more than a tyrant, the most perverse and egomaniacal that ever lived. After his death, he left behind only the suffering that all of his kind guarantee: punishment, famine and death.

Václav Havel was not content to see his country sovereign, but also fought for the freedom of other nations such as Cuba. In his personal geography the Cuban archipelago occupied a central place. His interest in the Cuban reality and conditions for the Cubans was constant, and from the seat of his country in Havana, we felt the support of his Government for free thought, individual rights and national independence. In us he saw himself in the years of dictatorship, in the current totalitarian state that we suffer. He felt at one with us Cubans.

Kim Jong Il did not stand out in life other than having been the prince of this new type of dynasty shared by North Korea and Cuba, the family legacy. His father, the dictator and mythomaniacal Kim Il Sun, guaranteed the delivery of power to him, which his grandson also received, then is great-grandson. No matter that his country lacks food and freedom; the only requisite is that which coincides with the rest of his autocrat lineage: to maintain power. And before the general disgust of the civilized world, the Cuban government decrees national mourning for the vile tyrant.

At some point, maybe very soon, we will erect the monument that Václav Havel deserves. We will lay flowers there for the rest of our lives, one generation after another. While in North Korea, they would tear down the statues of the Il family, given the opportunity.

We Cubans hope the Korean people will soon get their freedom, like we also want, and we wish them happiness. We offer the Czech people our sincere condolences, and we mourn their leader, a friend who understood and accompanied us at all times. And we will mourn him for more than 72 hours.  We will mourn for eternity.

Farewell, President Václav Havel.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Translated by Regina Anavy

December 24 2011

A few weeks ago I wrote a response about a naive comment on my blog that they signed under the name “Lori” where the following was recommended:

“It is my desire to improve myself, read books by writers who have had to leave my country. Read the bloggers of Vocesdecuba.com, come to Cuba and take the bus, walk the streets. Leave the tour guide and talk to people on my own, those who don’t give a learned speech that protects them from being persecuted. I wouldn’t stay in the hotel pool, but would walk along the malecón and learn about the Cuban reality. I wouldn’t waste my time with the shows at the hotel. I would go to the theater, to see the dilemmas facing today’s society. I wouldn’t buy only traditional music, which they recommend, but also the music that is not promoted, and whose songs are passed, thanks to Bluetooth, from cell phone to cell phone.”

This afternoon I remembered the many “Loris” who hide behind a nickname, either by ingenuity, opportunism or because they are actually cybernetic soldiers in the service of the Cuban state. I invoked them while attending the Bertolt Brecht Cultural Centre for the performance at the Vital-Theatre, of Four Less, by the playwright Amado del Pino, which won the Carlos Arniches International Award (2008) in Spain.

When the Director-General Alejandro Palomino said to light up the stage, on opposite sides appeared two small and humble rooms. In the center, a park bench, the kind that are scattered throughout the island and where Cubans still go to give flight, incredibly and with that stubborn calling, to their dreams and hopes for a dignified life.

The work, intense from the start, which builds to a crescendo from which the story breathes and takes shape, and, well, without being trite, could be called empty-nest syndrome, proposes a journey through a family’s destinies. Generations that harbor different and conflicting illusions. Andrés, the typical old father, a destroyed leader, expelled from the Communist Party, the usual stubborn and honest character that nevertheless needs to continue clinging to utopias, to promises that fade like clouds, who persists in his blindness to the present time and the changes that are imposed for a society lacking the most objective necessities, although he survives in a miserable reality, where fear, opportunism, spite and the abuse of sexual rights converge in an environment that doesn’t help heal the wounds.

Tamara: And that is your job? Do those who run things love you? Look, the worst is that there is no room even for a guy as romantic as you, who holds on to being revolutionary. (spoken with emphasis) Re-vo-lu-cio-nary, not to repeat the same litany…

Ania is Andrés’ daughter, who as a minor requires his signature to emigrate and definitively leave behind their home, and a country that is falling apart without mitigating the imposed conditions of extremism, which her generation doesn’t accept or understand or consider relevant. The mother, the ex-wife, begs him not to agree, that he not allow her to go.

Ania: I can’t take any more speeches, papá.

Tamara: … and at this rate we will have asylum in America!

Pollo: I had a professor who said you have to give up the past for the young. Not out of kindness but because if you only go half-way, they will knock you over and and go by on top of you.

Tamara: This is the only country where people don’t retire, where ministers are 70 years old. If there is no retirement, everything gets confused and you reach your forties receiving treatment as if you had  young promise, with tender certainty of tomorrow.

Andrés:We have become a marriage agency. Here the “uncoupled” Europeans meet partners who are healthy, educated, enthusiastic and even passionate. An entire nuptial prostitution!

In addition, Andrés has a son from a previous marriage, Saul, and because he did not give him legal authorization to leave the country, he separated Saul from his mother, who decided to give custody to the grandmother, so Andrés has a guilty conscience.

Saul: I never knew if you refused to sign to protect me or so you would not have your own problems, and that doubt was certainly the worst part of all.

Andrés: Now would be the time to answer you but I have no answer. Nor do I know; I was mixed up by convictions, by fear ….

Saul: Don’t go looking for answers, papá. They’re not needed. I want to learn to live without asking so much.

As if that were not enough conflict, Tamara, Andrés’ current wife, 15 years younger than he, is expecting her first child and has received a job offer abroad with the possibility of his accompanying them and which he refuses to consider, because leaving is treason, and also because he feels ashamed about his son Saul, who he separated from his mother and who, after all, has had the chance to emigrate, because he works on a cruise, but always returns.

Tamara: What can you offer your next child?  Maybe you’re denying him the possibility of a better life!

All the pros and cons of life as seen from different angles and options, accompanied by the characteristic humor that Amado del Pino places in his works, and that makes us feel like we’re there listening, a mental game of sympathy that infects us with brief sparks of cubanía.

Pollo is a gay friend and work colleague of Andrés. He has refused to join the Communist Party, because it’s the same people who berated him for his courage and honesty in living openly with his partner.

Pollo: It’s fashionable now to save us, to claim us, to enfold us, but neither am I going to ride – as old as I am – in that “triumphal” car. The boss called me on Monday to tell me that they offered me membership in the Party, now. If that means being in the vanguard, they should have given it to me a long time ago.

Andrés is discussing his doctoral thesis, which has been rejected because it was a study showing the low birth rate in the country, considering that young people emigrate at the time when they would normally be having children, and which would have given him his degree.

Tamara: Condemning those who leave or go away is shitty. Some do more damage by staying. My uncle watches the Round Table every afternoon and believes 100 percent of what they say on TV, but he dresses, eats and fixes up his home with what my cousins, who left, send him. I know he’s not rude, he still believes his ideas are true, but it seems to him that it’s too much to continue loving them, to pick up the phone and accept that they aren’t traitors. And that we are in the 21st century, because he buried his younger sister alive when she left for Puerto Rico.

Andrés: I suffer with the defects of this Revolution precisely because it’s mine.

Tamara: That’s the worst part of your thesis.

Andrés: If the young people leave, who are we going to work with? Who are we going to convince?

There’s a moment of greater anguish when Andrés accompanies his daughter to the airport, and she sings a verse of Fragancia. Then the sound of the plane taking off until a light goes out and leaves the stage dark.

The public swallows its suppressed tears because most of us suffer a similar separation.

Next comes a light that reappears like the birth of dawn.

Andrés: Fuck whoever invented the airplane – an agonized sentence because he can still hear the rumble of the engines.

Final theme song: “Thinking, thinking, tell Fragrance that I love her, that I cannot forget her, that she lives in my soul, go and tell her… tell her that I think about her, although she doesn’t think about me.”

Sometimes we doubt if life is different from theater, novels, conflicts that we writers invent and cast to the streets like a virus which then mutates and adapts to the environment to achieve greater damage. How do we measure the influence of our Art on the times, in the actual context of social life? And to what extent can we warn the next generations so they won’t be deceived like us?

I congratulate the playwright Amado del Pino for helping to disseminate with his art the hardships of the Cuban people, which are the same. A reality so alive and Cuban these days, like the royal palms. A denunciation of the social conflicts in today’s Cuba with respect to human feeling, regardless of their place of origin, language and geographic latitude. A perfect canvas that spreads, like rays of light to dark and unknown corners, with the technical and precise colors of Art in its fullness.

I counted the seats that were occupied and came up with 484, and because there were no more, they used the stairs and some chairs around the edge of the stage. Outside there were, like there have been for several weeks, two times that number of spectators who welcomed the news that the run would be extended until October 23.

I wish the Cuban communities scattered throughout the world could enjoy this work, inviting the group Vital-Theatre to book fairs and theater festivals, or by having it put on by artists in other cities. How is not important. The urgent need is to spread the work to get a greater understanding by other spectators about a national reality that has condemned us for over 50 years.

And paraphrasing a text of the play, I would like to remember that 50 years is two times 25. It is five times 10. That means 10 multiples of five. Fifty percent of a century. The full life of a man. A time and space where three or four generations converge, and that the most advanced has not been able to improve the fate of the last, in which coincide the fears and cause hair to fall out and wrinkles and furrows to appear on faces worn out by tears at seeing the departure of our children, siblings and friends. Several descendants who face the same abyss. They lose their teeth and their illusions. We have always been “four less,” up to a hundred less, thousands and millions less who walk scattered around the planet and whose spaces await them on this island of all.

Now it’s time to return. To retake the reins of a runaway country. To be able to spread hope in a land that doesn’t know that crop, so that eventually it serves as gratitude to all those who, in the past 200 years, have given their life for the Cuban nationality, free and authentic. This we owe to them who knew how to die for us, without having earned on our own a minute of that bitter agony.

Let them live in glory!

Translated by Regina Anavy

October 11 2011